Market Minute: Grapes, melons and citrus ripe for promoting
Market Minute: Grapes, melons and citrus ripe for promoting
Looking for some great sales tonnage items to promote in ads? Well, grapes, melons and citrus will put you over the top with your customers. 
Citrus: There is a good lemon and lime market, and the quality is excellent. California Navel oranges and mandarins remain in excellent supplies as well. Quality is also outstanding. Sizes on Navels are moving to larger oranges.
Melons: The volume is increasing on cantaloupes and honeydews with watermelons improving. The sizes are larger now on the cantaloupes and honeydews with jumbo dominating.
Grapes: There is a good production supply of red, green, black and globe variety grapes available out of Peru and Chile. Quality has been running superb.
Merchandising: There is nothing better than customers entering a produce department seeing massive displays of citrus, melons and grapes. That alone will lure them over to fill their shopping carts with bags of top-quality fruit for the family’s healthy snacking.
Make sure to build displays large enough with product that appears full but consists of at least 50 percent false bottoms to prevent shrink. More shoppers are drawn over to displays that have sufficient product stocked knowing that it is fresh. Those small weak displays won’t add up to many sales dollars — full massive presentations will outsell weak displays.
Check out grape, melon and citrus deals with your suppliers then draw up layout plans with your produce managers to support promotional ads that will boost sales.
Ron Pelger is a produce industry adviser and industry writer. He can be contacted at 775/843-2394 or by e-mail at [email protected].
